REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | February 14, 2005 February House, by Sherill Tippins. Houghton Mifflin, 317 pages, $24 hardcover. W.H. Auden recited poetry over the breakfast table and dunned residents for their weekly rent. Paul Bowles and Benjamin Britten nattered about each other's intrusive piano playing, until Bowles and his keyboard were exiled to the dank basement. Gypsy Rose Lee worked on her mystery novel by day and drank with Carson McCullers into the night. The literati and the glitterati dropped by for dinner and sometimes moved into a spare bedroom. And George Davis – the brilliant Harper's Bazaar editor at the center of what Anais Nin dubbed "February House" (because so many residents celebrated their birthdays then) – led after-dinner excursions to the Brooklyn waterfront's seedy bars, bringing lonely sailor lads home for the night, or the week. Those are among the hundreds of gossipy nuggets in this delightful history of an improbable, short-lived (1940-1941) experiment in artistic communal living. Squabbles over dirty dishes, smelly cats, and all-night parties abounded. But creativity flourished amidst the chaos, a whirl of artistic accomplishment that Tippins brings fluidly to life with marvelous detail. Tangled Sheets: Tales of Erotica, by Michael Thomas Ford. Kensington Books, 377 pages, $14 paper. Hands on your boners, boys. "Tom Caffrey," one of the more popular porn writers of the 1990s, is back. This hefty collection of well-wrought sex tales reprints two entire BadBoy books, Hitting Home (1994) and Tales from the Men's Room (1996), as well as work that appeared only in magazines, and – best of all – a handful of original stories. As he notes in a generous introduction, Michael Thomas Ford adopted the Caffrey nom de porn because, back when he started his erotica run, he was also writing for a nongay teen market. Since then, he's moved on to seriously hilarious essay collections and queer novels for grownups. But he remains deservedly proud of the 39 stories in Tangled Sheets, introducing each one with a pithy sentence or two that personalizes it delightfully. Though much of Ford's erotica appeared in porn glossies like Blueboy (his first sale, though he wasn't paid) and Advocate Men, the writing is refreshingly devoid of sweaty cliches – a harbinger of the quality of more recent fiction like Last Summer and Looking for It. Nothin' Ugly Fly, by Marvin K. White. RedBone Press, 76 pages, $14 paper. There is loss in this soulful collection: "on that block/ before death come sit on our stoop/ we counted stars." There is sorrow in this truth-telling collection: "my brother is pained/ thinking about me/ kissing men on the lips." There is politics in this assertive collection: "pray this world's foot/ be taken off our necks." There is pride in this fierce collection: "we the dark ones/ who formed support groups/ to speak to our loss." There is regret in this angry collection: "he/ made/ me/ call/ him/ lover/ believed breaking me/ was the only way to keep me." There is sex in this sultry collection: "his lick almost convinces me/ there can be no sweeter place." There is hope in this tender collection: "let the children walk/ the nobody ever stepped on your toes walk." There is beauty in this exultant collection: "innocent muscle/ tight thighed legs unfurl/ hot new butterfly." And there is a black man's assured voice in this eloquent poetry collection, and there is "nothin' ugly" about White's words: they soar. Side by Side: On Having a Gay or Lesbian Sibling, by Andrew R. Gottlieb. Harrington Park Press, 137 pages, $16.95 paper. Books by lesbian moms, books by gay dads, books by parents of queers, books by children of gay parents – what's left to explore of the queer family dynamic? Answering that question: Side by Side, a collection of essays by the (mostly but not always straight) sisters and brothers of gay women and men. All but a few of the 18 contributors – gleaned by Gottlieb through contacts with PFLAG, the Family Pride Coalition, and Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE) – are first-time writers, and their inexperience shows: these essays are more heartfelt than well-honed, more useful for coming-out counselors and college classroom reading than for an evening of relaxed reading. One piece that transcends the norm is "The Puzzle," by Brian Watts, about how he – and his staunchly Mormon family – came to terms with his gay brother. What shines through every essay, though, is the sense that, no matter how complex, painful, and initially confusing a sibling's sexuality can be, love more often than not sorts things out. Featured Excerpt: Aside from the potential for professional contacts, the evenings at 7 Middagh Street were intriguing in other ways. It was astonishing for [Benjamin] Britten to witness the carelessness with which everyone in the house exhibited his or her own particular brand of sexuality. His relationship with [Peter] Pears had begun only the previous year, after the two had come to America together. It was the first, serious love affair of Britten's life, and while he and Pears were much more discreet by nature than Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman, they had already inadvertently caused a scandal at their former home in Amityville. — from February House, by by Sherill Tippins Footnotes: BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR: Andrew Ramer's Two Flutes Playing: A Spiritual Journeybook for Gay Men is the inaugural title in the new White Crane Spirituality Series, dedicated to making "classics of gay spirituality and culture available to a new generation of readers." Ramer's book, first published by Alamo Square Press in 1997, is due in March from Lethe Press, with a new introduction by Ramer... DAVID LEAVITT has sold a new novel to Bloomsbury: The Indian Clerk is based on the true story of British mathematician G.H. Hardy's "strange and ultimately tragic friendship" with an unschooled math genius from India... YOUNG ADULT AUTHOR Alex Sanchez (Rainbow High, the Lammy-nominated So Hard to Say) has signed for two more books with Simon & Schuster Children: the first, Getting It, is about a straight boy who, with the help of his ostracized gay classmate, figures out how to grow up; the second is as yet untitled... DAVID LEVITHAN'S young-adult novel Boy Meets Boy, set in an ideal high school world where sexual prejudices are nonexistent, was a unanimous choice for inclusion on the Young Adult Library Services Association's list of recommended 2004 titles for school and public libraries to stock. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks